We’re now looking for passionate individuals to join the team in Trivandrum, Kerala. Are you a Javascript junkie or a Ruby on Rails diehard. You may love product design or be the best system architect that is seeking new challenges. We work across the spectrum of web business building and continue to hone and improve our agile processes.

One day you could be working with a large organisation like the BBC and the next with a founder of a new company with a very small budget who wants the minimum viable product for their idea in a matter of a few weeks. You’ll be working with a results oriented team and must love growth and change.

What are we looking for.

• Self starters
• Passion for all things web
• Hardcore development skills
• Entrepreneurial Attitude
• At least 3 years of experience in your field

Specific positions we are hiring for include.

• Ruby on Rails developers
• Zend PHP developers
• CSS/HTML and JS developers
• iPhone developers
• QA specialists with a passion for TDD
• System Admin Gurus with skills in AWS and/or CI

Click here to Apply

From technology strategy and implementation to product and market development, the Pollenizer team played an integral part.

SportsPassion’s suite of free online community tools allow team managers and teammates to better communicate and collaborate, while sharing the fun and spirit of their sport.

Pollenizer Gets A Guernsey

So how does Pollenizer help? 3eep CEO Rob Antulov says the Pollenizer team has the ability to take an entrepreneur or business from the early concept phase into development and then beyond, once a product becomes live.

“In any company, let alone in a start-up, the real risk is that you try to do too much,” Antulov says. “In a start-up that can be particularly dangerous since there are so many things that are not yet proven – so, you can easily expend scarce resources doing the wrong thing.

“The cases where Pollenizer has helped us focus are numerous, ranging from understanding which clients are the right ones to listen to, through to which features in a new product design are the ones we should develop and which ones we should drop.” Pollenizer has also helped define and then target SportsPassion market campaigns.

“After you work with Pollenizer – if you really listen – you’ll know what you need to do, and why. Then, comes the hard part. Doing it. Lucky they help with that too!”

Rob Antulov, CEO 3eep

“As a start-up with limited funding and access to top talent, we were fortunate to cross paths with the Pollenizer team who could offer their services to our company, maximizing our chances of getting things right,” Linqia CEO and Founder Maria Sipka says.

“Phil Morle conducted a technology assessment and confirmed the challenges we ‘sensed’ were there and highlighted opportunities to take our product offering and engineering team to a new level.

“Over six months we launched two products much quicker than we were able to in the previous 18 months and our team developed a strong foundation of accountability and alignment.”

How It Connects

Linqia works by presenting relevant and interesting commercial partners to social networks who bring affiliate deals, advertising, sponsorships, content, new members, products and innovative technologies.

Key decision makers at social networks register to Linqia for free and specify what type of opportunities they are interested in receiving. Linqia approves commercial partners to present their opportunities to selected social networks which Linqia sends to the key decision maker via the marketplace.

As a start-up with limited funding and access to top talent, we were fortunate to cross paths with the Pollenizer team…

Maria Sipka, CEO, Linqia

Don’t be tempted by the 98 octane hi-revving twin-supercharged speedster; sometimes it’s a simple, reliable, well-understood and easy-to-repair diesel you need.

One of my favourite episodes from Top Gear is the “Big Trip To Africa”. Jeremy Clarkson and his two sidekicks have to buy a car each for £1,500 and then drive it across Botswana. James May (aka Captain Slow) picks an old Mercedes 230E. Jeremy and Richard Hammond laugh, thinking that driving an old German prestige car across Botswana’s deserts is a rather silly choice. Actually, James’ choice was a smart move. He picked the old German tank because the 230E is one of the most common cars in Africa, giving him access to lots of spare parts and skilled mechanics all along the trip, while Jeremy and Richard struggled to find parts and skilled people to fix their cars.

Building a web business is not exactly like driving across Botswana ☺. But when it comes to technology there is something to learn from Top Gear’s “Big Trip To Africa”. There are some important decisions to make when it comes to the technology choices for your web business. First let’s look at the software component and then the hardware part.

1. The Software: Fast and Simple

You will need to pick a software bundle to power your web business — the stack of layers that will go in-between your hardware and your users. A typical software bundle for web applications will include:

• An Operating System: To control your hardware.
• A Web Server: To coordinate all the elements.
• A Database System: To store data.
• A programming language: To interface with your users.

If you can, go open source. Open source technologies will give you a lot of advantages:

• Code quality: Big open source project such as PHP of MySQL are constantly reviewed by a large community of skilled developers that are committed to localise, flag and fix all bugs and other code issues. The outcome is outstanding code quality.
• State of the Art technology: as they are constantly evolving, popular Open Source technologies are always on top of the game when it comes to modern features.
• Security: when code is Open Source, security bugs and issues are usually quickly identified and fixed.

A good example of Open Source package is LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl, PHP or Python). It’s a great pick as it will save you cost of licensing commercial software and it’s being widely used to drive many successful commercial web businesses. For example MySQL claims over 11 million customers and as of February 2009 Apache served over 49% of all websites. Other examples of popular web-services making extended use of LAMP are Digg, Facebook, Wikipedia, and WordPress. The popularity of the LAMP package means it is stable, is well documented in many resources around the web, and developers are easy to find when you need to hire people.

2. Hardware: sometimes having your head in the clouds is a good thing

Now that you have your software bundle you need some hardware to power it. There are two things you have to keep in mind when working on a web service:

1. You want your application to cost you as little as possible, especially when you get started.
2. You want your application to work properly regardless of the number of users.

Scalability

Your application needs to work efficiently regardless of the number of users. Having 10 or 100,000 users will make a huge difference on your hardware. The “cheap” (but at the end expensive) way of scaling an application is to add hardware (one server is not enough to handle the load? Let’s plug another one…). This can become very expensive and may lead to dramatic issues when you scale beyond typical startup size. At some point, adding servers is prohibitively expensive or just not possible anymore. And what happens during the low season? You find yourself with a lot of useless and expensive servers to operate and maintain.

The smarter way is to use computer ‘clouds’ — a very interesting approach that eliminates a lot of scaling issues. Instead of using a single server, you plug your application into a farm of servers and you pay monthly a bill based on the resources you used. Companies such as Amazon and recently Google are offering such service (and some other, smaller, players like Mosso and Joyent).

Cloud computing is great but there are also some basic engineering/coding habits that will help you to deliver at low cost. For example; optimise your code. You don’t want to have to rewrite part (or all) of your code because your idea is successful. So it is very important to write your code always thinking; “Is it the best way to do this? Is there anyway to do that with less code? Can I give the database a break?” The extra amount of work is definitely worth it.

Pay as you grow

What is true for hardware (computing power) is also true for storage and bandwidth. Most semi-pro/pro hosting companies will offer you bandwidth pricing in tiers (and same concept with storage capacity); 100gb/month, 2tb/month… Unfortunately it means that you always pay for something that you are not necessarily using and it also means that you will run into trouble if you exceed your credit limit (usually you pay for extremely expensive additional bandwidth or get throttled-back so some users have a disappointing experience).

To avoid that you want scalability (again). You want to pay for the bandwidth you are actually using and nothing more and you don’t want to be limited. Here again the solution is in the cloud. Amazon provides a great service with its S3 storage / bandwidth service. Putting your files on Amazon S3 will also resolve your storage issue, as Amazon S3 storage capacity is virtually unlimited. And you will pay only what you are using. Google recently started something similar. Probably some very good things are going to happen in the near future in this area.

To conclude

In the past two years, starting an online business has became easier than ever. Open source technologies have now reached a high level of maturity and cloud computing has emerged as a solution to scalability and has drastically reduced initial operational costs. This is good news for Internet entrepreneurs!

What has your experience been like with these new technologies? Are you fighting a prejudiced view internally? Has cloud computing helped your business yet? Please leave a comment about that and… have fun building awesome web-services!

The picture of his taskboard is absolutely fantastic! It conveys an enormous amount of information in an aesthetically pleasing way, has all the metrics up there, on plain sight. I think we can learn a lot from it and from there, see how we can apply it to our work with our partner X-Minds and our clients. Remote working is very different and we can learn and do something new and innovative :) It’s a completely different ball-game when your team is widely distributed and finding out what works in co-located teams is a very valuable experience on which to build.

The new business is led by two terrifically talented founders, Keith Ahern and Tom Adams. Even though we are in the early days of iPhone development, Tom and Keith have already created some major apps in iphone.theaustralian.com.au, iphone.news.com.au, iphone.truelocal.com.au, iphone.moshtix.com.au and carsguide.mobi.

We’ll be making our own applications and helping other companies get Mobile 2.0 ready.

I want to celebrate Mick’s incredible entrepeneurial energy now. This exciting new business exists because Mick ‘pollenized it’ into life. He buzzed around the Web 2.0 flowerbed moving the pollen from place to place until new ideas emerged. He found investors and founders and sprinkled in a good dose of Pollenizer team to accelerate the business. It went from nothing to something amazing in just a few months.

Mick certainly practices what he preaches.

If you need to go mobile, drop MoGeneration a line: info@mogeneration.com

If you are in Sydney, and are looking at adapting your application for the iPhone or have a new idea for an iPhone business or application, particularly ones that are location based and for the Sydney or Australian audience, please get in touch with us.

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